Google DeepMind leadership shakeup: Hassabis steps down as CEO, Jeff Dean exits to start Discovery Loop
Google's biggest AI leadership shakeup in years: Demis Hassabis steps down as DeepMind CEO to become chairman and Alphabet $GOOGL chief scientist. Longtime Google chief scientist Jeff Dean is leaving after 27 years to co-found AI startup Discovery Loop with three other senior res
Google carried out one of its largest AI leadership shake-ups this week. Demis Hassabis is stepping down as CEO of Google DeepMind to become the unit's chairman while adding the title of chief scientist for parent company Alphabet $GOOGL. He continues to lead Isomorphic Labs, Alphabet's AI drug discovery spinoff. Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind's chief technology officer, moves up to senior vice president of the unit, now reporting directly to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. Separately, Jeff Dean, Google's chief scientist for 27 years, is leaving to co-found Discovery Loop, an independent public benefit corporation focused on using AI to automate scientific and engineering research. Joining him are Sanjay Ghemawat, a Google senior fellow, Oriol Vinyals, a DeepMind vice president, and Quoc Le, a co-founder of Google Brain. Google will act as a founding investor and cloud partner in the new venture. Alphabet shares fell nearly 4% following the announcement, a sign investors are reading the departures as a loss of core research talent even as Hassabis stays on to steer the company's long-term AGI strategy.